I’ve begun a series of tutorials on the basics of developing your own time-lapse electronics. To make sense of all of it, I’m working in a forward-manner: starting with the most basic elements, and providing tips and tricks that will be built upon in future tutorials.

While I understand that most of the DIY builders reading this post are long past the point of building just a simple intervalometer, for those just getting started, this should be highly informative. Unlike many other tutorials, I’m not just giving you some schematics and a block of code. Instead, my goal is to explain why things are done a certain way, and teaching foundations for better system design.

This tutorial covers building a simple test circuit that will allow you to validate your software and hardware without putting wear on your camera, the importance of protecting your equipment from mistakes, three different timing options: blocking, non-blocking, and non-blocking using simple interrupts, and finally controlling a Canon or Pentax camera. (Nikon, etc. I don’t have much info on – perhaps one of the Nikon-having contributors can expand in a later tutorial.)